Megalithomania

MARCH WAS THE MONTH when the cracks in New York City showed all at once.

There was the much-commented-on publication of the Citizens Budget Commission’s 2023 survey, broadly interpreted by news organizations to mean that only half of all New Yorkers planned to remain in the city in the coming years. The commission’s report recorded widespread dissatisfaction with most quotidian quality-of-life barometers: schools, safety, public services, not to mention the increasingly unaffordable simple bare necessities of our urban jungle. The survey’s release was shortly followed by reports of more murders on the subways, generating more safety hysteria, typically from public officials who have tied their electoral fate to perceptions about crime.

It’s true there have been days recently when the city seethes with aggression bordering on mass psychosis. (And this despite or because of the bud- and blossom-filled incipient spring, the phase a friend refers to as “the week of white flowers,” already a distant memory.) On the subways, even nonphenotypically crazy people were muttering aloud about regular delays and overcrowding, about other people listening to music without headphones, and the police officers now stationed at every stop. “Fuck the police!” one guy said, loud, jerking his head, as he passed a trio of cops on the West Fourth Street platform.

A peaceful, confident city does not require its populace to be placed under armed guard; a restive city feeling itself on the skids looks at these mostly neutral cop faces—now of all genders and colors—studies their midriffs weighted down with guns, tasers, zip ties, radios, and body armor, and girds itself for confrontation.

We’re seeing more masks underground again. Rather than warding off contagion, they now seem to be used as much to give people a way to make themselves disappear. Eye contact is minimal. A certain type of relatively well-off person, the remnant straphanging middle class, handles the subways by operating in a cloud of total disregard: earbuds, sunglasses, maybe also a mask. One such person, a well-dressed woman, entered the car ahead of me the other day and stopped just inside the doors and turned around. There was plenty of room for her to have kept moving—behind her as well as to the side—no obvious nuisances, even a few empty seats. Her eyes focused on some vague point over my shoulder. She didn’t answer to “excuse me.” I pushed past.

The very wealthy have grander ways of becoming invisible, paid access to a parallel city of private clubs, private transportation, and private equity. Compared with them, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman seems like a solid community board member. At least he speaks to homeless people. But what I have started to think of—somewhat vaguely, somewhat grandiosely—as “the privatization of reality” is not only an aspect of the current New York malaise, but an enduring trend. It goes back to what many New Yorkers, including many who should know better, now romanticize as the golden years of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, those heady early days of widespread gentrification and falling crime rates. The seeds of our current crisis were planted by choices made then.

The Citizens Budget Commission didn’t call me for my opinions, but the place where I most keenly feel the violence and inhospitableness of this new urban era is in the buildings. Every age produces the architecture it deserves, and twenty-first-century New York City has no shortage of metonymic monstrosities to choose from: Hudson Yards; the “Eye of Sauron” tower in downtown Brooklyn; the shoddy “safe deposit boxes in the sky” that manage to make the Midtown Manhattan skyline seem smaller, a provincial outpost of Moscow, Kuala Lumpur, Baku, or Topeka; the walling off of the North Brooklyn waterfront. I would even include the seemingly tasteful yet spectacularly vapid and behaviorally policed High Line. Pick pretty much any of these and you can produce a cultural history of decades of dumbed-down development and blinkered greed.

This is not a story of “decline,” nor am I pining for a mythical golden age, but each of these structures tells a story about choices that were made when other and most likely better outcomes were possible. New York City isn’t “dead,” but many potential New Yorks have been killed off and are being killed off daily by callow generations of elites and dubiously credentialed urbanist “enthusiasts” whose imagination of what a city should be were fed by Sex and the City and Friends instead of Good Times, Taxi, or Seinfeld.

The building that really broke my New Yorker’s heart, however, is the recently completed John A. Paulson Center, named for the hedge fund manager who shorted subprime mortgage–backed securities and helped collapse the economy back in 2008. It was designed by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, which made its name in the 1990s (I deduce that Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake watched Friends on Thursday nights) with some semifamous woodsy, glassy, tricksy houses—full of conceits that made sure you knew someone had authored them—and advanced in the usual way to gloomy museums and thrifty collegiate halls.

Bolstered with some $1.2 billion, courtesy of the Big Short, KieranTimberlake has now birthed New York University’s new gymnasium, dormitory, and office complex, a 735,000-square-foot black-steel and black-mirror-glass megalith that stretches the length of the west side of Mercer Street, from Houston up to Bleecker. Armored with unnecessary cantilevers and pointy little bay windows that resemble medieval tower defenses, the thing—it looks like a server farm or a Borg outpost—casts an uncanny penumbra of jagged shadows and piercing beams of reflected sunlight and heat over what had long been a restful block just off the bustle of nearby Broadway.

The building isn’t just run-of-the-mill bad in itself; it’s bad with a dark genius that damages not just the neighborhood around it, but also, as we’ll see, desecrates one of New York’s truly great remaining pieces of humane modernism, the development first known as University Village, then partially rechristened “Silver Towers,” in 1974, after a big-pocketed NYU donor who at least had the courtesy to possess a surname that conjures moonlight, Tolkien’s elves, and an age that is always second best.

BACK IN THE AUGHTS, what would eventually be transformed into the Paulson Center was only one part of NYU’s master plan, dubbed NYU 2031, which earmarked two additional sites in central Greenwich Village for demolition and redevelopment. In a way, it might have been better had NYU succeeded, since the compromise concentrates the university’s recent architectural malevolence into one anomalous superblock.

The old gym building chosen as the scapegoat for the university’s scaled-down ambitions was an innocuous two stories of beige brick. It didn’t need to call attention to itself and was even endearing in the way that a relative of modest means knows how to make the most of what they’ve got. Sited several additional feet from the sidewalk, the gym made that particular corner of Mercer and Bleecker feel both roomier and cozier than your average city block. Anyone could pause for breath on that corner as if it were a small piazza, even if entrance to NYU’s temple to fitness was permitted only to “NYU community members,” restrictively defined. Mostly, I remember a quaint, purple jogging track on the roof, along with some batting cages and tennis courts open to the elements and to voyeurs in nearby buildings. I used to watch students run in circles and hit balls off tees from a friend’s apartment.

That friend is a professor at NYU who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a teenager, learned English at sixteen, and now teaches philosophy. His apartment, awarded by sheer luck of the draw, before he even got tenure, happens to be on the fifteenth floor of the southernmost of the three University Village towers (designed by I. M. Pei in collaboration with his partner James Ingo Freed) that occupy the rest of the plot—from Mercer to LaGuardia Place and from Houston Street to Bleecker.

University Village was commissioned by NYU and built from 1964 to 1967 during what now seems a heyday of responsible and shockingly efficient “public-private partnership.” Two of the high-rises were reserved for NYU graduate students and faculty, while the third, occupying the western side—between Wooster Street and LaGuardia Place—was part of the Mitchell-Lama program and, to cite the curiously disavowing midcentury cant, earmarked for “middle-income” occupants, i.e., for neighborhood residents whose tenements were demolished or compromised in the construction. It remains so to this day, an afterimage of a less dystopian, less cutthroat housing policy in one of the world’s richest neighborhoods.

The quaint refusal to monetize every possible inch of space also meant that both the street and the towers appeared more spacious. Set back from the wide sidewalks of LaGuardia and Houston by plantings and from Mercer by the old gym, Pei and Freed’s blocks are positioned around a grassy and cobblestoned courtyard with a monumental edition in ferroconcrete of a late Picasso maquette of the usual woman’s head, rising a couple stories high at the center—a jet-age obelisk.

It wasn’t just that the towers are graceful in themselves—whitish concrete ascending atop shaded colonnades; Pei and Freed succeeded where the original, problematic visionary of “towers in the park,” Le Corbusier, had failed: by refining the proportions of the buildings from ponderous slabs down to finlike rectangular spires and adjusting their scale toward the human and thus toward the density and complexity of Greenwich Village. It was large-scale housing done beautifully in an era of horrendous large-scale housing done not just on the cheap but with active malice while hiding behind the fig leaf of Corbusian precedent. University Village endures as a shaming rebuke to anyone who might think that public housing high-rises were doomed to fail on account of their own internal contradictions. It’s also a rebuke to those who’ve forgotten about the vitalness of the commons and what happens to a society when they’re pillaged.

That commons includes the neighborhood, the streetscape, also the natural elements. There are—or rather, were—the globe lamps that clustered around the sculpture lawn, which closely resembled those at Pei and Freed’s sister trio of towers in Philadelphia’s Society Hill. (The globes seem to have been removed and replaced at some point in the past ten years, though a remnant fixture remains standing at the top of the flight of stairs leading from LaGuardia Place to the building at 505 LaGuardia Place.) Then there are the totem-like concrete place markers at the entrances to University Village from Houston and Bleecker. The latter are a bit raffish yet somehow encapsulate the effect of the whole. And I can’t forget the circular seating by the playground on the east side of the complex, open to the public. This has now become a gated dog run and playground with gross microplastic flooring, officially open to the public, but nearly invisible from the street, accessible to nonresidents only via a labyrinth of fences, while the perimeter is patrolled by security guards.

When it came to the elements, Pei and Freed designed each of their towers to hide behind the others, so as to leave as much sky open as possible and not loom quite so large over their low-lying Greenwich Village neighbors. This was accomplished by arranging them in a pinwheel. Their exact positioning was determined by the desire to make it seem, to people walking or driving along Houston Street, that there were only two towers; the two visible ones would shield the third. This was before computer modeling, so the architects used physical scale models of balsa wood and glue to understand the perspectival effects. Cleverness deployed in the cause of modesty.

Having set out its “2031 framework,” NYU endeavored to disrupt, if not outright destroy, the delicate equipoise of Pei and Freed’s composition, specifically by erecting a fourth tower—thirty-eight stories tall—north of the sculpture lawn, where Wooster meets Bleecker. The design, by the English firm Grimshaw Architects (which, not unlike KieranTimberlake, advanced in the usual way from an atelier-like arrangement with a small but potent portfolio—in Nicholas Grimshaw’s case, “high tech” designs for student housing and pastoral factories—to a corporate behemoth with a global footprint and binders full of nauseating airports and steely institutional buildings), isn’t nearly as bad as the Paulson Center, and the architects strenuously tried to anchor their intervention in the logic of the Pei-Freed plan.

That being said, the same impulse that led to the Borg-like corner building was already in evidence, even inspiring a preservationist struggle waged in defense of University Village. Yes, the irony is boldface: Village preservationists came to the rescue of a superblock development that their forebears had scorned a half century before. Other failed elements of the NYU 2031 plan included a dreadful scheme to fill the voids between the Washington Square Village slabs with twisty towers, many times more ponderous than those slabs. That would have endangered the exquisite Sasaki Garden, one of Manhattan’s last public oases, among other things. Michael Kimmelman, the Times’ sleepy architecture critic, was sufficiently roused to pen a column on the matter, perhaps because he was at one time a resident of the neighborhood. In the end, only the site of the Paulson Center—initially known as the Zipper Building, on account of its jagged, toothy profile, like the fly on a pair of pants, which underwent alteration before construction—was “successfully” developed, though NYU still hopes to build on the northwest corner site, where a low-lying Morton Williams supermarket sits at the corner of LaGuardia Place and Bleecker, set back just as the old gymnasium had been. Only a reinvigoration of local activism, not carried out under the banner of “preservationism”—and its attendant associations with NIMBYism and conservatism—but in the name of a sustainable future for New York City, can prevent it.

TO UNDERSTAND what’s been lost and what could still be lost, however, it helps to go back in time to the years when NYU 2031 and the “Zipper” were nothing more than hotly debated renderings, during which I spent a lot of time at my friend’s place taking in the views facing east from the bedrooms over the rooftops of the Lower East Side and then, more panoramically, from his living room, to the south and west down the remaining length of Manhattan, with a hint of chemtrail orange sunsets over New Jersey. Sky, like air and water, is one of those basic goods that New Yorkers have learned to covet, restrict, and commodify: “And the best part is you didn’t have to kill anyone to get it,” my friend’s mother, born under Stalin, told him when she first visited. That was the promised land they’d set out for, not having to kill anyone.

Normally, I liked to approach Silver Towers from the west, taking the steps up from LaGuardia Place in the middle of the block, between two community gardens, and arriving at a concrete flagstone plaza dotted by benches with rounded corners and planters, where I’d pause and let the city move around me.

Continuing along the path, I’d come to the cobbles of Wooster Street, which cut through the complex but was closed to traffic except for necessary deliveries. Here, facing the central courtyard, came my favorite part: a low concrete wall of no apparent use except to demarcate the boundary of the courtyard square and a little stretch of lawn on the Bleecker Street side. This was an urban, modernist version of a pastoral stone wall that worked a modest magic of making the whole square feel more spacious than it really was, another tiny stroke of modest genius, like the pinwheel design. And where we have become used to hostile architecture, the wall was kind: wide enough to lie down on and take in the sun. It’s a wall that does all the opposite things of what a wall does: It makes its enclosure bigger instead of smaller. My friend and I would lunch there often and wander into long conversations about metaphysics, ethics, and literature, but it had been many years since we’d done so. (He’s in Berlin a lot now; I’m mostly in Brooklyn.) So it wasn’t until recently, guided by the perverse spirit of nostalgia, that I arrived at our old lunch spot and immediately felt something was off. The light was wrong, the courtyard appeared to have shrunk. It was almost oppressive.

That was when I looked up and saw how the Paulson megalith had confiscated everyone’s share of the sun, particularly the share belonging to those living in the eastern and southern towers. The entirety of the new structure dominated in this way and displayed a callous disregard for human flourishing. Cold LEDs blazed in the windows even on a clear bright day. So fully did it refuse any conversation or play with the spaces and buildings around it that it seemed to wear a mask.

This is hardly the worst of human atrocities, but something about its stupidity and carelessness felt gratuitously wounding. It was an act of hostility against civilization in its root sense—the habits of cities. Or it announced the triumph of a new civilization: thrusting, dismissive, cruel. Sure, these types of buildings have been cropping up all over. A different essay could put the Paulson Center alongside other freshly dissociative or psychotic buildings in Midtown and along the waterfronts of Queens and Brooklyn and the far West Side. But I’d rationalized that sort of thing as the products of the real estate–developer class: men like Trump and Stephen Ross and whoever hides behind the Vornado Realty Trust. From them one could expect only the cynicism of “everything shall be monetized.” This, on the other hand, was a betrayal at the heart of what should have remained a civic space.

Looking at the steel and glass hulk of the Paulson Center felt like watching a crime committed in broad daylight against the city by the university that bears its name and against every resident of that city. But the cruelest and most proximate betrayal was against those very people—the faculty—who made the university what it was, who were supposed to instill in their students a love of knowledge and truth and beauty and a desire for the good—or at the very least instruct them in how tall buildings in a small urban space can be made to feel as natural and majestic as a sheltering stand of redwoods. How a city might become something better than it was.

The worst feeling was the knowledge—ever present but usually unconscious in such encounters—that this time burst out: The building could not be unbuilt. A bad book can be thrown away, a bad film can forever languish in your streaming queue, but a bad piece of billion-dollar nonarchitecture will endure well past whatever expiration date there may be for the civilization that made it. This is what being on the “wrong side” of history feels like. A possible future had ended, and a much worse one had arrived.

It was also like watching the murder of a beloved friend. But unlike a murder, which can happen only once and will leave a psychic stain after the blood has been washed from the streets and the police tape taken down, this crime scene was perpetual and recurring in every moment, and it would go unpunished.

To add to my cycling emotions of rage, pain, and powerlessness, there came a note of self-contempt: I understood a time would come, maybe quite soon, when I would walk past this new hideousness and—without exactly ignoring it, without exactly accepting it—realize I’d become accustomed to its presence. Accustomed to the murder of a friend!

This was already happening when I returned to the scene of the crime in late spring. I completed my old walk—west to east. And where I’d stopped dead in my tracks before, now I went along the winding path from the concrete wall toward the corner of Bleecker and Mercer. I noted half-heartedly that NYU or the Paulson Center’s architects had tried to keep the old setback from the corner, but the city had put up a barricade of Citi Bike docks where a walker used to have the freedom to cut a diagonal path across the grid. I looked into one of the building’s many lobbies, a cross between an auto dealer’s showroom, an office park, and an airport lounge. My autopsy was nearly complete. If you consciously cropped out the cantilevers and concentrated on surfaces and stared at it with an eye jaded by, say, a habitual experience of Hudson Yards, the Center started to look almost okay.

Even though the northeast corner of Paulson grubs up against the eastern Pei-Freed tower, it also seems to be trying to harmonize with it. The rippling reflections of the buildings of Washington Square Village on the other side of Bleecker, in the light of a clear May evening, almost make you feel like the Paulson Center’s purpose is to act as a giant, vertical reflecting pool, an expensive bathroom medicine cabinet with a mirror. That impression wouldn’t be wholly wrong: For all the mismatched, “casual,” stacked-box aesthetics and all those fake hatchways that look like open windows but aren’t, the Paulson Center is mostly just a flat, two-dimensional building, in the way that MFA workshops speak of “flat” characters. It’s like a person with no inner life. It confuses mirroring with openness.

Which brings us back to the idea of a university and the idea of a city that the building betrays. Both the city and the university, in different ways, were supposed to have been dedicated—at least in the modern era—to cultivating and sustaining people’s various and multifaceted inwardness. This is done for its own sake but also to better allow us to practice a public-facing outwardness that does not lead us to shove our fellow human beings in front of onrushing subway trains; freeze into apathy in the face of others’ suffering; answer cries of pain and anger with zip ties, pepper spray, and riot gear; or refuse to countenance expressions of inwardness different from our own.

A civilization that creates only flat surfaces and screens and calls it, as the architects of the Paulson Center do with Orwellian doublespeak, “an eclectic mix of spaces … designed to encourage connections and community engagement” has forgotten how both individuals and cities thrive. As a vision of the city and the world, it has little to recommend it—and probably can’t last much longer. It doesn’t matter how many police are on the subway platforms or stationed on the campuses of our universities.